Kay Richardson

Series: OXF STU SOCIOLINGUISTICS

When we watch and listen to actors speaking lines that have been
written by someone else-a common experience if we watch any
television at all-the illusion of "people talking" is strong. These
characters are people like us, but they are also different,
products of a dramatic imagination, and the talk they exchange is
not quite like ours.
Television Dramatic Dialogue examines, from an applied
sociolinguistic perspective, and with reference to television, the
particular kind of "artificial" talk that we know as dialogue:
onscreen/on-mike talk delivered by characters as part of dramatic
storytelling in a range of fictional and nonfictional TV genres. As
well as trying to identify the place which this kind of language
occupies in sociolinguistic space, Richardson seeks to understand
the conditions of its production by screenwriters and the
conditions of its reception by audiences, offering two case
studies, one British (Life on Mars) and one American (House).